With writing and recipes by everyone from Jane Smiley to Marina Abramovic, The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook is a fun, quirky, often beautiful mix.

"One good thing about being a novelist is that nothing is wasted," Ruth Ozeki writes in her contribution to The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett. "Every silly thing you've ever done—every mistake, dumb job, bad idea, failed relationship—is redeemed by its novelistic potential." And its culinary potential, too. In this lovely new book, Garrett—herself an artist and writer—has collected stories and recipes from a quirky selection of dozens of writers and artists, including Neil Gaiman, Nikki Giovanni, and Marina Abramovic. The authors here have scavenged their pasts, their families, their relationships, and their personal tragedies, and their contributions by and large realize the potential for a good story Ozeki describes. They give us stuff to eat, too.

Ozeki's story is this, and it's less weighty than some of the others: In the 1980s she was the producer of a show for Japanese television that wanted to depict, for Japanese women, "diverse American women leading interesting personal and professional lives." The show was called Mrs. America; because its sponsor was a meat-industry lobbying group, it followed that the American women it featured all happened to be cooking a lot of beef. "We documented all manner of wives and meats," Ozeki writes. The experience served as the inspiration for her first novel, My Year of Meats, and gave her the recipe she contributes to this book, adapted from "a real housewife in Florida": Coca-Cola Roast. (The soda tenderizes the beef; for added flavor, there's Campbell's Cream of Mushroom and Lipton's Powderized Onion Soup.)

Garrett was inspired by a 1961 book also called The Artists' & Writers' Cookbook, which included contributions from Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Harper Lee. For the most part, she "reached out to complete strangers" whose work she admired, she said in an email; the cast of characters she assembled represents an eclectic range of backgrounds, geographies, disciplines, and life experiences. The book is beautifully illustrated by Amy Jean Porter.

The poet and critic Elizabeth Alexander, who read at Barack Obama's first inauguration, contributes a piece about her husband, who cooked "Eritrean fantasia food" at a restaurant in New Haven; it's all the more poignant if you know that he died suddenly in 2012, which Alexander wrote about in her 2015 memoir The Light of the World (excerpted in the New Yorker). Joyce Carol Oates's contribution, also about loss, is called "Recipe in Defiance in Grief." It's maybe 200 or 300 words, and swiftly devastating: "And it comes as a slow revelation to you—(you who are dazed with travel, both at the time and now years later recalling that time as across an abyss of such depth and vertigo you dare not glance into it)—that yes, this is the last meal he will prepare for the two of you, the last meal he will prepare on such an occasion, or on any occasion, on this wintry evening in February 2008, as it is the last time you will set the table for two." The actual recipe Oates gives is for simple scrambled eggs with onions and smoked salmon; for Alexander, her late husband's shrimp barka, a dish with basil and dates "that existed nowhere in Eritrea but rather in his own inventive imagination."

Some of these recipes tend toward the conceptual, like the ceramicist Jessica Stoller's "male gaze macarons." But this is also a functional, if unusually lyrical, cookbook. The novelist Edwidge Danticat celebrates the anniversary of Haiti's independence with a traditional dish for the occasion, soup joumou, made of root vegetables and pumpkin and spices; An-My Le, a Saigon-born photographer who writes of her memories of the Tet Offensive, remembers her grandmother with a recipe for pho; Jane Smiley gives us Trenton tomato pie. And Anthony Doerr, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, opens the book with a tribute to foraging in Idaho's West Central Mountains, and just a wisp of a recipe for huckleberry muffins.

Sometimes the story begins in the essay and ends in the recipe that follows. Lev Grossman, the author of the Magicians trilogy, writes about ennui—about your brain being "like a darkened city"—then gives a recipe for seared scallops and bearnaise sauce. Make the bearnaise, he says, and then sear the scallops, and don't bother plating anything—just spear a scallop with a fork and dip it in the sauce: "Remember that city? Suddenly, for the first time ever, somebody plugs in the main line, and in an instant, the city is ablaze with light, and you're experiencing a kind of pleasure you've never known before." Must be a hell of a bearnaise.